Get Your iPhotos Organised

Mastering iPhoto’s rapid album-creating
features will save you a great deal of time

Change view

Switch between viewing your flagged, edited
and hidden photographs in this drop-down menu

Mastering
iPhoto’s rapid album-creating features will save you a great deal of time

Photo icon

Flagged or favourited images gain icons in
the scrollbar, alongside the toolbox that denotes whether a photograph has been
edited.

Group shot

If you want to make changes to a number of
photos at once, the flag tool helpfully groups them together.

Hidden feature

Possibly the most useful feature of all is
hide – this stashes those lumpen first-try shots, hiding them from your camera
roll album.

Vital info

Device: iPhone/iPad

Difficulty: intermediate

Time required: 1 hour

What you need:

·iOS 5.1 or later

·iPhoto ($4.50)

Digital photography is brilliant: it allows
you to snap away to your heart's content, taking many hundreds of photos rather
than carefully pondering every shot. The downside is that this quickly leads to
a large and unwieldy photo collection, with the good photos languishing
alongside their more ordinary siblings.

Any useful photo app offers you ways to
sort your images in some way, but iPhoto distinguishes itself by being so click
and speedy.

The flag and favourites feature are, they
are not entirely intuitive: while the basic are easy enough, some of the more
advanced tricks are a little more fiddly – although if you can master them
they’ll make organizing your photos even easier as your image collection grows.

Step-by-step guide: the hot list

Step 1 – The top shots

Step
1 – The top shots

When you flag images or save them as
Favourites they are added to the appropriate albums on your home screen,
although even Apple is vague on the difference between the two. We use flags
for marking images worth editing, before retouching them and saving only the
perfect ones into favourites.

Step 2 – Planting a flag

Step
2 – Planting a flag

One key difference between flags and
favourites is that you can flag your most recently imported photos. Press and
hold the flag icon and then press Last 7 Days or Last 24 Hours. Tap choose and
select photos in the scroll bar to flag multiple images, pressing done when
you’re finished.

Step 3 – Multiple view

Step
3 – Multiple view

Having trouble choosing between similar
photos? Tap an image in the photo scroll bar, and then tap and hold a second
photo to see the two side-by-side. Pinch to zoom and swipe to pan around on
individual photos for really detailed comparisons. Tap flag or favourite to
mark all the images.

Step 4 – The easier way

Step
4 – The easier way

Another, less touch-sensitive, way of
pulling up multiple images is to tap the cog icon, then select multiple. Tap a
series of photos or press range, then pick the first and last pictures to see a
series of shots, tapping again to deselect those you don’t want. Tap done to
see your photos side-by-side.

Step 5 – What’s missing?

Step
5 – What’s missing?

iPhoto has a glaring omission: despite
iPhoto’s own home screen being the album menu, there’s no way to create albums
within iPhoto. Instead, you must create albums in the Photos app – that’s the
photo library your iPad came with – and they will automatically import into
iPhoto.

Step 6 – Create an album

Step
6 – Create an album

Given this rather unnecessary hassle, it’s
doubly unfortunate that even in Photos, creating albums isn’t nearly as
intuitive as it should be. In the home screen, tap the arrow in the top right,
then select several images before tapping ‘Add To’ to finally name and create
an album.